What next step for Iraq?
-La question irakienne (The Iraqi Question), Pierre-Jean Luizard, Paris: Fayard 2002. pp366;
-Mémoires d'Irakiens: à la découverte d'une société vaincue (Iraqi Memoirs: Discovery of a Defeated Society), ed. Pierre-Jean Luizard, Monde arabe Maghreb-Machrek 163, Paris: La Documentation française, 1999. pp305
Pierre-Jean Luizard's La question irakienne, a history of Iraq from the British mandate to late last year, has been written with the general reader in mind and argues that any solution to the present "Iraqi question" will have to be one informed by knowledge of Iraqi history and society, as well as by knowledge of Iraq's historically conflict-ridden relations with its neighbours, many of whom have interests in Iraqi affairs.
Luizard, a French Arabist and specialist on Iraq, whose collection of interviews with mainly Iraqi exiles, Mémoires d'Irakiens, first published in 1999, has recently been reappearing in bookstores, is also the author of a 1991 study on the role played by the Shi'a ulema in the constitution of the modern Iraqi state in the 1920s, following British occupation of the Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra during the First World War. In his new book he emphasises the multi-ethnic and multi-confessional character of modern Iraq, its substantial Kurdish and Arab Shi'a populations preserving links with the Kurdish communities of neighbouring Turkey and Iran and with the Iranian Shi'a, respectively.
However, Luizard also recapitulates the history of Iraq since the 1968 Ba'ath Party coup in detail, showing that if Saddam Hussein is a monster, and there can be little doubt of that, he is also a Western, and, more particularly, an American monster. At the end of those sections of Luizard's book on Saddam's consolidation of power and on fluctuating US policy towards Iraq, the reader emerges with a powerful sense, first, of the horror inflicted on the peoples of Iraq over the last several decades, and then of the cynicism of US policy, if there has been a coherent one, towards Saddam's regime.
Readers bewildered by the policy of the present US administration towards Iraq will not find clarification in Luizard's book, the author warning, in late 2002 when the book was finished, that the US seems about to take a major "false step" in policy towards the country. However, they will find ample material on past administrations' policies, and on the way in which the regime in Baghdad has been able to exploit these to survive catastrophic wars first against Iran from 1980 to 1988 and then against the US-led international coalition assembled to liberate Kuwait from Iraqi occupation in 1991.
The history of the Iraqi state begins with the invasion and subsequent occupation of the three Ottoman provinces of Mosul, Baghdad and Basra by the British during the First World War. This situation was later given an official character by the League of Nations, which made Iraq a British mandate in 1920, causing a revolt across Iraq led by Shi'a ulema that took the British months to suppress. While the 1920 Treaty of Sèvres recognised the right of the Kurds to self-determination, the 1923 Lausanne Treaty cancelled this and made the northern Kurdish territories part of Iraq despite Kurdish resistance.
The setting up of a virtual British protectorate over Iraq with Feisal, one of the sons of the Sherif of Mecca, as king, meant the exclusion of Iraq's Shi'a population from power, since that population, led by the powerful mujtahid of the Shi'a holy cities of Najaf and Kerbala, had refused to accept either Feisal's rule or British tutelage of it. In June 1923, Ayatollah Mahdi Al-Khalisi, accused of being Iranian and one of the most powerful opponents of the mandate, was exiled to India, and the Hashemite monarchy in Iraq was officially inaugurated in 1924, set up, according to Luizard, "against the society" over which it was to rule.
Many of Iraq's subsequent problems originated from this settlement, Luizard writes. The army played a significant role in Iraqi affairs from the foundation of the state, and that army, controlled by elites previously in the service of the Ottoman administration, facilitated the domination of the country's Shi'a and Kurdish populations, the Shi'a at least "being excluded from government, from a military career and from government generally, as they had been during the Ottoman period".
Following the 1958 coup d'état, led by Abdel-Karim Qassem on the 1952 Egyptian model, that spelled the end of the monarchy and the ancien regime in Iraq, the tensions became obvious. "The republic destabilized the fragile equilibrium set up by the British," Luizard writes, "and it was not capable of producing stable elites similar to the political class that had ruled Iraq under the monarchy. The former elites had been eliminated, and the liberation of movements that had previously been contained -- whether communist, Kurd, Arab nationalist, or Shi'a -- did not allow the emergence of 'national' elites" to replace them.
"The confessional and ethnic domination on which the Iraqi state rested during British tutelage thus gave way to the simple domination of a particular clan, which would be characteristic of Saddam Hussein's regime." Following the second Ba'ath Party coup in July 1968 that brought General Ahmed Hassan Al-Bakr and his relative and second in command Saddam Hussein to power, that clan was the Takriti from the town of Takrit north of Baghdad.
In the 1970s oil transformed Iraq, with revenues multiplying ninefold between 1972, when the new regime nationalised the oil industry, to 1974 alone. Oil made Iraq a rich country almost overnight, and the officially socialist ideology of the Ba'ath Party, making the state the central player in the economy, meant that the state controlled huge patronage, in turn controlled by the Ba'ath and the Takriti clan. Oil allowed the government to pursue a policy of industrialisation, as well as allowing it to build the already large Iraqi armed forces. At the same time, the Ba'ath government began a campaign against the Iraqi Shi'a, the army firing on a march of Shi'a from Najaf to Kerbala in 1977 and executing Ayatollah Mohamed Baqer Al-Sadr and his sister Bint Al-Huda in 1980.
In July 1979, Saddam Hussein pushed Al-Bakr aside as president of Iraq, holding a meeting of the ruling Revolutionary Command Council during which a third of its members were taken out and shot. In September 1980, Iraq attacked Iran, with the tacit encouragement of the United States, eager to see the downfall of Khomeiny's revolutionary regime. From this moment on, Luizard writes, Iraq began its "descent into hell".
That descent, however, would scarcely have been possible without Western support. In a chapter tracing US policy towards Iraq since the 1970s, Luizard shows that from 1975 on, the West "helped Saddam Hussein to construct the most formidable arsenal that the Middle East has seen, with the exception of that held by Israel". Furthermore, the US, eager from 1980 on to support Iraq in its war against Iran, and believing it to be, in the words of US Under-Secretary of State John Kelly in 1990, "a force for moderation in the region", "presided over unprecedented worldwide business aiming at arming a Third World country, in which all Western countries participated."
In March 1982, the Reagan administration removed Iraq from its list of countries supporting terrorism, a year before Iraq used mustard gas for the first time in its war against Iran. In 1990, one of President Bush's first actions was to give the green light to high-technology exports to Iraq, destined for Iraq's armaments factories, two years after the Iraqi government had used gas against the Kurds at Halabja, and a few months before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait.
US policy during the Iran-Iraq war was that of "a plague on both your houses", arming Iraq, but also arming Iran through the dubious mechanism of "Irangate", a famous scandal that touched Reagan himself. According to former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, quoted here, "we want them to continue killing each other for as long as possible," and by the time the war ended Iraq had lost the equivalent of "435% of its revenues from oil over the eight years of the conflict... its debts standing at more than US$100 billion", mostly owed to Western banks and to Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. It was these debts and Kuwait's insistence that they be paid, together with Saddam Hussein's apparent belief that the US would not react to his annexation of the country, that pushed Iraq to invade Kuwait in 1990.
"The acute economic crisis" following the end of the Iran- Iraq war "had placed Iraq in a vicious circle of heavy foreign debt, inflation, unemployment and a free fall in the price of oil", Luizard writes. "The Iraqi economy was on the edge of disaster, and bankruptcy seemed inevitable. Kuwait's economic resources appeared to be the expedient by which the Iraqi economic crisis could be resolved."
During the war that followed, 85,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on Iraq, between 130 and 180 000 Iraqis were killed, and it was shown that it "is possible to destroy a country without risking a single soldier on the ground". The United States used shells containing enriched uranium, capable of penetrating heavy armour and underground bunkers. The resulting radioactivity has led to an epidemic of cancers and birth defects in southern Iraq, and US and British servicemen are still seeking redress for "Gulf War Syndrome", a mysterious illness, officially denied, affecting soldiers who fought in the Gulf.
Following Iraq's withdrawal from Kuwait, the Iraqi army fleeing in disarray under American fire, President Bush urged the population of Iraq to rise up and overthrow Saddam Hussein's regime. Starting in the south of the country, rebellion soon reached 14 of the country's 18 provinces, placing the survival of the Baghdad regime in doubt. However, the cease-fire, together with the US military's decision to allow the Iraqi Republican Guard to put down the rebellion ("we will not interfere in Iraq's internal conflicts"), meant that rebel-held towns such as Rumaytha and Kerbala were bombarded with chemical weapons.
"From their aircraft, the Americans witnessed the carnage and knew exactly what was happening," Luizard writes. "Bush had called on Iraq to rise up, but that appeal had been addressed at the Iraqi army and not at the population... Washington had no interest in seeing victory go to the rebels," fearing them more than it feared Saddam Hussein, who could now be "contained" at the head of a weakened Iraq thanks to UN sanctions, "the most severe ever imposed on a country in modern times".
Asked in 1996 whether the sanctions regime against Iraq was sustainable in view of its human costs (500,000 dead Iraqi children, according to the journalist), former US Secretary of State Madeleine Albright told the cameras, "we think the price is worth it." In Luizard's view, the decade of sanctions were useful in that "not only were they not going to bring down the Baghdad regime, they were going to reinforce it," making the regime's survival dependent on Washington and permanently "containing" Saddam Hussein.
Writing in 2002, Luizard is unable to decode current US intentions towards Iraq, writing that the "reasons why the decade of sanctions proved so valuable to the US are still in place". He is sceptical of the Iraqi opposition being intermittently groomed by Washington, particularly of Ahmed Shalaby, unknown in Iraq and wanted in Jordan for fraud. Finally, he writes, "even though the irrational has taken the upper hand in the US since 11 September, will its sheer power now push this, the most powerful country in the world, to take a false step?"
Reviewed by David Tresilian
